Outsourced Intelligence and the War on Trump’s Legitimacy

According to a report by Buzzfeed, the FBI did not examine the DNC servers that it says were the target of Russian hacking.

Six months after the FBI first said it was investigating the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system, one US intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

“The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers,” Eric Walker, the DNC’s deputy communications director, told BuzzFeed News in an email.

The FBI relied on the findings of an outside cyber security firm, Crowdstrike, for forensics that the DNC breech was carried out by actors in Russia. Crowdstrike’s own site claimed a Russian source of the breech in May of 2016.

According to Buzzfeed’s intelligence source, “CrowdStrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate.”

Well, that‘s reassuring.

In a 13-page report made public the last week of December, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed in a joint analysis that Russia was behind the widespread hacks. . . . But the analysis was attributed to broad intelligence across both public and private sectors. Nowhere in the report does it say that the government conducted its own computer forensics on the DNC servers.

And the source of at least the FBI’s “analysis” said that “Russia-linked” hackers –not necessarily State actors –were the source of the hacks.

Of course, Pres. Obama has let us all in on his belief that “not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin” –so that’s good enough for Democrats, I guess.

In fact, Democrats and their media supporters are continuing to imply –because the facts are lacking –that Russsia hacked the DNC, that they thereby “meddled” in the US election, and that somehow that is the reason Trump won the election, facts and reality notwithstanding.

The Washington Post tells us that the CIA and the FBI are “in agreement” that “Russia aimed to help Trump win the White House”.

ABC’s David Muir reveals that “Putin wanted Donald Trump to win.” Yes, David. And so did America.

The reality is that Mrs. Clinton is an animated sump of corruption, that bad actors across the globe wanted her to be the next president, and ponied up unknowable sums to try to make it happen, but the American people said “No”.

The Left were astonished that she lost. Here they did all the right things to bring about a Clinton victory: They smeared Trump with every prog crime imaginable, from misogyny to racism, to hatred of immigrants and Muslims, to disdain for veterans –and none of it worked.

They registered the dead to vote. They encouraged illegal aliens to vote –with the collusion of the current president. Their supporters voted multiple times. They bragged about registering ineligible people to vote. They had the felon vote, and pardoned felons in time for them to vote. They flipped the vote. Some areas even provided voting machines purchased from a Soros-affiliated corporation.

And still that entitled, contemptuous, lying elitist thief could not win the election.

So now the “intelligence community” has been enlisted to try to imply that “them Rooskies” somehow got Trump elected.

That would be the same “intelligence community” that a few weeks ago was excoriated by the Left for continuing to investigate the Clinton emails, and thereby throw the election to Trump.

But all is apparently forgiven now that Democrat-appointees Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan have issued a joint report on Russian hacking.

The U.S. report announces on page 1 that it “covers the motivation and scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion.”

As Kenneth R. Timmermann points out, it seems odd to put the analysis of motive before the facts. But that is probably the best approach given the paucity of any evidence, let alone fact.

Officials are confident that hackers did not physically change any vote tallies by sabotaging electoral systems, but Russia’s alleged actions nevertheless could have influenced American citizens on how to vote.

Yes. Because revealing the truth could only by a detriment to the fortunes of Hillary Clinton. And the only change to vote tallies was accomplished by Clinton supporters.

In Thursday’s Capitol Hill hearing, Mr. Clapper was obliged to acknowledge that, “No one believes” that Russian interference “compromised the vote tally.” And also, “We have no way to gauge that.”